Hi & welcome to another patch of mine on the internet!

I’m Dom. All of my life I’ve done nerdy tech stuff and I get a huge amount of joy from tech, elegant systems, and what most would probably consider over-thinking.

This incarnation of my personal web stuff is an experiment inspired by the concept of a digital garden, although I do plan to write some regular blog posts and move old posts over soon.

The goal of the experiment is to integrate a portion of my daily note taking into this site to share them with minimal extra thought or effort. I don’t know if this will work, as a portion of my notes are useless transient task management, and another portion is probably too personal to be comfortably shared. I feel there should be something valuable in there occasionally, but who knows - that’s what makes it an experiment :)

Now and next up §

Getting this site setup, messing around with workflows, as is tradition. To make it as easy as possible for me to keep this up, I want it tightly integrated into my existing note taking and homelab infrastructure.

Currently aiming to:

• have a section in my main Obsidian vault with all markdown content for here
• have the deployment pipeline setup such that all I need to do is commit and push to end up live (still need to enable the automated hook for the last step!)
• have the source HTML hosted on something at home, proxied via and overlay network to a free cloud instance. Probably using Gitea, Caddy, Oracle Cloud, Ansible Semaphore, Terraform, Wireguard, and Tailscale/Headscale).
• have dates and latest commit messages to easily identify where changes have happened and when
• have all blog posts shifted over

If/when done, I would like to get into the habit of committing changes every 1 - 5 days. If I successfully integrate this into my regular current note taking, each commit should have some changes, with no extra effort required.

Aside from that, my daytime also includes:

• building a drystone wall in preparation for…
• getting the driveway tarmacked and cobbled
• rebuilding the remaining walls and beds out front.
• trying to be the sort of person who just casually grows vegetables :|
  • prepped garden & built & planted some beds
  • eaten a bunch of veg and learned from a bunch of failures
  • 2x more planted beds & veg success 2024
• installing, repairing and rebuilding fences in preparation for…
• planning and threatening to build some decking (hopefully by the end of May 2023 2024!😬)
• lots of chores and general old-house upkeep.

And nerdy stuff:

• continuously rebuilding homelab and core-infrastructure
  • homogenising home automation with homeassistant
  • redesigning network in to replace old routers, improve wireless and prepare for gigabit internet.
• side project: front end for LLMs, as an excuse to play with Open AI and Pulumi
  • originally started this with AWS (Lambda, APIGateway, DynamoDB, Cognito), Pulumi and React, with a bunch of considerations for collaboration and business environments, like multiuser, multitenant, and tight AWS integration. 2024 I think I want to create something similar, but instead with a focus on single or few-user usage in a selfhosted environment, maybe even play with Svelte?
• side project: blockchain version of a game I created about 20 years ago, as an excuse to play with Solidity and Polygon.
  • had lots of fun experiments on this, still struggling to get the balance of keeping original features, against utilising blockchain tech in the way I really want it to work. I think I can selfhost a version of this in the first half of 2024, but I’ve thought that many times.
• tinkering with remote desktop in VR, as it presents a host of interesting challenges relating to networking, VR, programming, hardware and feels like the future.